Posts tagged un

To put it mildly, Uber's reputation for supporting women is less than stellar -- it's not hard to find women who refuse to be passengers, let alone drivers. However, the ridesharing service just took a significant step toward gender equality: as part of a collaboration with the United Nations, it'...

Deals to reduce greenhouse gases (such as 1997's Kyoto Protocol) have been in place for years. However, they've typically limited the reductions to richer nations -- poorer countries have objected to previous attempts to broaden the scope due to requirements they see as burdensome. At last, though...

The UN's International Telecommunication's Union (ITU) has revealed that over 3 billion people are now connected to the internet, an increase of 6.6 percent over last year. The good news is that such access can have a huge impact "for those who are the poorest and most disenfranchised, including w...

Happy weekending, folks!
Welcome to Barely Related, a conversational Friday column that presents the non-gaming news stories that we, the Joystiq staff, have been talking about over the past week. And no, we're not stopping our focus on industry and gaming news. Think of this as your casual weekly...

Aside from paying someone to scream "this is a problem" into everyone's faces, there's not much more that the UN can do to tell us that we're heading towards an environmental catastrophe. The United Nations' World Meteorological Organization has found more proof of our forthcoming doom, showing th...

Killer robots are at the heart of popcorn fare like the Matrix and Terminator movies, but there's a serious debate underlying it all: do we want to trust fully autonomous machines with lethal weapons? Some would argue that it's just too risky, and the United Nations has accordingly held its first...

We've known for years about the growing volume of electronic waste, but a new UN study suggests that the situation is only getting worse -- and that the US is largely to blame. The organization says that Americans created the most e-waste in 2012, at 9.4 million metric tons. The country produced...

When a 10,000 ton meteor exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabisnk back in February, it was only a small taste of what Earth's future could look like if we aren't vigilant. Last week, the United Nations General Assembly approved of plans to form a dedicated anti-asteroid unit, a development th...

As anticipated, several countries pushed to expand the UN's authority to regulate the internet and the US, along with many of its allies, have said they will not sign the updated treaty. Interestingly, the collapse of negotiations began when language was added to the new rules about "human rights...

In a rare showing of bipartisanship, the House unanimously passed a resolution to ban UN regulation of the internet at the hands of the ITU (International Telecommunication Union). It states that the US would "continue working to implement the position of the United States on internet governance t...

The ITU hasn't updated its rules since 1988. Thankfully the telecommunications arm of the UN is currently meeting in Dubai to rewrite its hopelessly outdated regulations. The US and Canada quickly sought to place limits on any new rules and keep the international body's focus on telecom operators...

Last year, the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU) told us there were five billion mobile subscriptions worldwide at the close of 2010, and now it's reporting that at the end of 2011, that figure hit a staggering six billion. China and India account for one billion a piece, and it bri...